in the same well-bred way she did everything.

Thomas Erastus hurt his foot one day. Rather he got it hurt during a
matutinal combat at which he was forced, being the head of the family,
to be present, although he is far above the midnight carousals of his
kind. Thomas Erastus sometimes loves to consider himself an invalid.
When his doting mistress was not looking, he managed to step off on that
foot quite lively, especially if his mortal enemy, a disreputable black
tramp, skulked across the yard. But let Thomas Erastus see a feminine
eye gazing anxiously at him through an open window, and he immediately
hobbled on three legs; then he would stop and sit down and assume so
pathetic an expression of patient suffering that the mistress's heart
would melt, and Thomas Erastus would find himself being borne into the
house and placed on the softest sofa. Once she caught him down cellar.
There is a window to which he has easy access, and where he can go in
and out a hundred times a day. Evidently he had planned to do so at that
moment. But seeing his fond mistress, he sat down on the cellar floor,
and with his most fetching expression gazed wistfully back and forth
from her to the window. And of course she picked him up carefully and
put him on the window ledge. Thomas Erastus has all the innocent guile
of a successful politician. He could manage things slicker than the
political bosses, an' he would.

One summer Thomas Erastus moved--an event of considerable importance in
his placid existence. He had to travel a short distance on the
steam-cars; and worse, he needs must endure the indignity of travelling
that distance in a covered basket. But his dignity would not suffer him
to do more than send forth one or two mournful wails of protest. After
being kept in his new house for a couple of days, he was allowed to go
out and become familiar with his surroundings--not without fear and